Integration Project Building Blocks

I’ve been writing for some time about the use of the iBOLT Integration Platform for business process orchestration and integration of JD Edwards and other ERP and enterprise systems. The objective this year has been to share lessons learned about what’s possible and how-to get there. In the past we’ve commented on components, resources, services, business processes, and flows.

I think it is useful to step back and look at the big picture again: what are the building blocks of an iBOLT Integration project? In reality, it’s quite simple: these are the ten categories of building blocks for an iBOLT project.

Building Block

Description

Topology

An iBOLT topology map provides a view of the physical systems that are part of an iBOLT project such as the iBOLT, ERP, CRM, eCommerce platforms, Email, Collaboration and other systems and servers that are connected in an integration project.

Resource

In iBOLT’s nomenclature, Resources are definition of servers, DBMSs, applications, Web servers and any other resource in the project IT environment. The Resource Repository defines the external systems that iBOLT needs to access during project execution. This provides a way of managing a project's resources from a separate location outside of the actual project. You can also reuse predefined environment settings in different projects, enabling you to switch execution environments quickly and easily.

Service

iBOLT’s exposed functionality that defines how flows are invoked from an external system. The Services include Web Service, EJB, HTTP and more. In general, the iBOLT Services have less to do with connectivity to proprietary software or technology protocols and standards and more to do with service-oriented architecture or SOA capabilities and other fundamentals of business process integration and orchestration.

Repository

The iBOLT project repository collects information about needed elements of an integration project. Each iBOLT integration project includes project-related repositories that include components, servers, applications, and variables.

Business process

iBOLT provides business process modeling capabilities, which include business functions or activities, business rules, resources, and performance measurement. The business process editor provides a high-level view of the business process that is suitable for facilitating communication between business users and the iBOLT business analyst and project architects.

Integration flow

Flows are at the heart of an iBOLT project as they contain the details about how each step in the integration process is to be executed, The integration flow is a set of steps and their logic that control the order of the steps' execution, called flow orchestration. The integration flows are executed by the iBOLT Server during deployment.

Component instance

While the prupose of this list of building blocks is designed to overview all the building blocks of an iBOLT integration project, it is clear that many people think of components as the building blocks of a project. A component instance is activated as a step or a trigger of an integration flow sequence. Flow components can have connecting, adapting, converting, and processing capabilities.

Trigger

Triggers are used to activate a specific flow due to external activation, such as HTTP or Web Services calls, or due to flow orchestration definitions, such as Scheduling.

iBOLT Service

While we have previously mentioned services, these were primarily external services. Here weare referring to iBOLT Services that tend to control the logical flow of project execution. iBOLT Services provide flow logic orchestration capabilities, such as scheduling, Publish and Subscribe and Invoke Flow, as well as data handling services, such as Flow Data.

Mapping

The data mapper in iBOLT is perhaps one of the most utilized capabilities of the iBOLT Integration platform. The Data Mapper is a graphical tool providing data manipulation, transformation, conversion and enrichment capabilities between source and destination. The iBOLT expression editor is used in the context of the data mapper to perform transformations between source and destination.

Not every integration process will involve all of these project building blocks, but the business analyst, architect or developer who takes on an iBOLT project will likely use all of these at some point.

Well, yes, but it comes with a pre-built framework for modeling, designing, monitoring and orchestrating business processes. So they aren't just programming objects - that would require coding projects.

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